I saw the new horror movie The Ruins this weekend. It wasn't as bad as I thought it would be, but it still wasn't very good. There's nothing but a steady stream of crap flowing through the theaters right now, but I still have to have a fix now and again.

The movie was your basic boilerplate of stupid but attractive young American tourists go to some secret local spot where they're not supposed to be and get picked off one by one. This film has a relatively interesting killer, an intelligent population of plants living in the ruins of an ancient Mayan temple. The plants are able to move their vines really quickly when they want, which doesn't make any sense, but I can suspend disbelief for that. One neat they they're able to do is mimic sounds (such as cell phones and human voices) by vibrating parts of their flowers. This was actually a reasonably creative element, but I wish it had been used to better effect (e.g. luring the victims to different parts of the inside of the temple, which we see very little of).

Unfortunately, most of the scares are standard gross-outs, rather than more sophisticated psychological scares. And the ending is silly and lame. But it was at least short (right at 1:30) and I never really got bored.